Tag Archives: video

When I was very young — maybe around second grade — I started taking piano lessons from Mrs. Bickley, who also happened to be my school’s librarian. But I had little patience for practicing. Working through a new song, note by note, making the same mistakes again and again created such visceral frustration that there came a point when I refused to practice at all. Sometime during fourth or fifth grade, my parents allowed me to quit. I felt some shame whenever I would venture into the library and see Mrs. Bickley, but that couldn’t nearly outweigh how much I disliked practicing.

Some years later, when my brother was taking guitar lessons, I tried again. My parents could take us both to the music store with the sound-proof practice rooms in the back, and we could take our lessons. That time around, I lasted perhaps a year before deciding that it wasn’t for me.

In middle school and high school, I was involved in theater (some, of the musical variety) and choral groups. I wasn’t much of a singer, but it turns out that at certain times and places, if you are a male, it’s sufficient just to be willing to show up. I was the beneficiary of just such a situation.

Many, many years later, I found myself regretting that I didn’t stick with music. I’m envious of people who can sit down with an instrument, and play a song. As time went on, my regret grew more and more palpable. I still had a mini Casio keyboard that I received as a gift as a child. I plugged it in, and started to pick out songs on its miniature keys. After several weeks of the tinny, synthesized keyboard sound, I decided that it was time to commit. I bought a full-sized keyboard, and I started to play again. Whereas I had been an impatient child, I have become an adult who is quite content to spend an hour or two working through a troublesome section of a song.

I can’t claim that I’ve become a very good piano player. But I can pick through a song, and repeat it enough that it eventually starts to sound coherent. One of my favorites is Traumerei by Schumann. It’s short and melancholy and open to oh-so-much expression. Here, I play it too fast, and I’m sort of distracted by the concerns of self-recording. I hammer the keys too hard and unevenly in many places, and I continually turn even eighth notes into dotted eighth notes and sixteenth notes.

But it brings me joy to be able to sit down at an instrument, and play a song.

(I should note that the C above middle C on my keyboard is busted. The key itself is loose and most of the time, it doesn’t play when struck. So if you are paying close attention, you’ll notice that that note is almost entirely absent from the song. Also, I recorded the sound on Garageband on my iPad. For some reason, that app has recently decided that my songs really need occasional, randomly placed gong sounds. So again, if you are paying close attention, you’ll hear a couple of Garageband gongs.)